COP must ditch fossil fuels to get serious about climate

For four consecutive years, Global Witness, as part of the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition, has told the story of a COP now awash with the fossil fuel industry’s toxic interests.  

We’ve gone even further at this year’s climate summit, exposing how a leading figure in the COP29 team encouraged and helped to broker potential oil and gas deals for a prospective (but fake) COP sponsor.  

You might be forgiven for thinking Global Witness has a COP problem. Every year our colleagues continue to travel to the talks, engage with those attending and wait with bated breath on the outcomes.  

Yet how can we still have such faith in a process that we have accused of being influenced by an industry that is overwhelmingly responsible for the climate crisis?  

COP’s untapped potential 

It’s precisely because we believe in COP that we want it to be better.  

In terms of multilateral efforts to tackle the climate crisis, it really is the only horse in town.  

Every year, millions of people around the world look to COP, hoping that it might deliver what’s needed to get the world on the path away from climate breakdown.  

And it has pedigree. The seminal agreement at COP21 in Paris, which limits global temperature rises to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, is still the gold standard.  

Regularly cited by organisations like ours as an example of what the world should be aiming for, this was a result that could only come from a multinational forum like COP.  

While implementation has since been a challenge, the ambition that world leaders displayed is a COP success story.  

We know how much COP can achieve. But we also know that the climate conference has been notoriously weak on fossil fuels, in large part due to the influence this industry has wielded for decades.  

In the early days, these companies’ sway has been more obvious, as they worked to dispute the unequivocal relationship between fossil fuels and climate crisis.  

Now the tactics have shifted from outright climate denial to sponsorship of events like COP and pitching to be “part of the solution.”  

Fossil fuels have co-opted COP 

So prevalent is this influence that it has somehow been deemed appropriate to host the current and previous COPs in blatant petrostates, where the line between politics and polluters is not so much blurred as it is non-existent.  

Hence the bizarre situation in which a leading figure in COP29 can be a Minister of Energy for a petrostate and opening doors for our undercover investigator to engage with Azerbaijan’s state oil and gas company about fossil fuel deals.  

This isn’t even to mention that last year’s COP president was also head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, a company that sought $100 billion worth of fossil fuel deals in the year that Sultan Al Jaber was fulfilling his COP duties.  

We do not believe that serious climate solutions can be created while the very room in which these decisions are made is filled to the brim with those who stand to lose out most from climate action.  

Namely, the very small minority of executives – and those doing their bidding – whose only goal is to preserve their profits.  

They who want to maintain the status quo that is driving us to the brink of irreparable climate disaster and already impacting so many around the world.  

Time to reclaim COP from fossil fuels’ grip 

Not only should the self-interest of the fossil fuel industry bar it from conversations about climate solutions, but its record too.  

Fossil fuel companies have reneged on commitments and spun a story claiming that they can play a role in a climate-positive future, all the while ramping up production with a flagrant disregard for the urgency of the climate crisis.  

Inviting someone who has proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted completely undermines COP’s diplomatic efforts.  

The world urgently needs to get off fossil fuels – the science on this is unequivocal. Yet fossil fuel companies want to carry on extracting and burning.  

These two goals are completely incompatible, so it should be a no-brainer that a conference about climate change cannot be overrun with fossil fuel companies.  

Sometimes the most obvious and simple statements are true.  

And this is the message that we are once again delivering to COP and the UNFCCC – the UN process that COP sits within.  

Be bold, be inspiring and be prepared to shut out the voices that want to keep humanity in peril. Be something that we can all believe in and get behind without cynicism.  

We’ve all had to tell a friend or loved one that a person influencing their thinking doesn’t have their best interests at heart and might just be toxic.  

This is where we are at now with COP – ditch your toxic friends and let’s get serious about climate action, before it’s too late.